Abstract: This note describes seven "tricks" for improved efficiency and accuracy of the photon map method. None of these tricks are particularly revolutionary or hard come up with, but it is my hope that this note can save some people the effort of reinventing them. The first trick reduces flicker in animations, while the following three tricks reduce computation times anywhere from 25% to factors of five-to-eight. The fifth trick investigates how to get unbiased radiance estimates. The sixth trick describes how to combine irradiance estimates from several independent photon maps (for example computed in parallel on separate computers). The last trick is somewhat more experimental, but promises a speedup close to 16 in the photon tracing phase for very complex scenes.

One-line summary: Seven ways to improve efficiency and accuracy of the photon map method.

Published in: Henrik Wann Jensen, Frank Suykens, Per H. Christensen, and Toshi Kato. A Practical Guide to Global Illumination using Photon Mapping. SIGGRAPH 2002 Course Note #43. ACM, July 2002. (San Antonio, USA, July 21-26.)

Course web page: A Practical Guide to Global Illumination using Photon Mapping .

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